I've lost data with Seagate drives, have stopped purchasing anything from them years ago, and everybody I know who's knowledgeable enough to buy/install a hard drive has reported the same bad experiences.

Even just recently, I was given a system that was headed for the trash (not worth the owner's time to investigate whatever's wrong with it). It's got a pair of 500GB Seagate hard drives. One's completely dead, the other had SpinRite stuck at under 0.04% for one week straight (and not moving)...similar problems with Seagate's own diagnostics tools.

Normally I wouldn't bad-mouth a company based on anyone's personal anecdote(s), but because of the failure rate I've been seeing firsthand, I've sworn them off.

Seagate is not to blame. I had many WD drives die on me. It's a fact of life. Every drive will die, just a matter of time.

Whenever I get a new drive these days, I do a full sector by sector scan with HD Tune or similair app, check smart logs, and then put drive into production. If there are any bad sectors, I RMA the drive right away.

If people want you to go with something else fine but at that amount of storage on any HDD is never safe.

What do you mean by that? The figure higher storage HD's are more safer or am I wrong? I just wanted to avoid WD green when it comes to storing the data. For a back up, sure why not.

Whenever I get a new drive these days, I do a full sector by sector scan with HD Tune or similair app, check smart logs, and then put drive into production. If there are any bad sectors, I RMA the drive right away.

People just don't take care of their drives. With those insane capacities (or rather: densities; there's never enough capacity) drives are destined to fail much faster than they used to as it is, but taking good care (no vibrations, no shocks, sufficient airflow, sufficiently cool airflow at that - anything over 50*C harms the drive - and no useless shutdowns and spin-ups to "save power") is of an utmost importance and will greatly shift towards plain luck (or the lack of it, thereof) for any manufacturer or brand.

What do you mean by that? The figure higher storage HD's are more safer or am I wrong?

The higher density of a 3TB to a 1TB say plus the different number of internal disks (for one HDD) to get that storage with the density the data is then stored for the HDD to read/write too makes things more to less safe. Even if you take all that into account you are still trusting that one HDD for your data meaning any amount of storage on any HDD is never safe.

The higher density of a 3TB to a 1TB say plus the different number of internal disks (for one HDD) to get that storage with the density the data is then stored for the HDD to read/write too makes things more to less safe. Even if you take all that into account you are still trusting that one HDD for your data meaning any amount of storage on any HDD is never safe.